They say that when Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán was courting his third wife he threw her a party in her remote northern Mexican mountain village that nobody there will ever forget.

It began when a small army of men with automatic weapons arrived to secure the area on 200 all-terrain motorbikes. It really got going when the cocaine kingpin stepped out of a convoy of six light aircraft that flew in for the event. The middle aged drugs baron proceeded to dance for hours with the 17-year-old village beauty queen to the oompah-pah rhythms and accordion riffs of a well known local band as expensive whisky flowed.

Money was already no object for El Chapo. Mexico's most wanted drug trafficker has become fabulously rich on the back of his murderous trade, so rich in fact that this week he featured at No 701 on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, with an estimated $1bn fortune.

But in a sign of how vilified he has become in government circles, even the Forbes publication elicited apoplectic responses. Mexico's president, Felipe Calderon, castigated the magazine for glorifying its enemy number one. "Magazines," he said, "are not only attacking and lying about the situation in Mexico but are also praising criminals."

But then Guzman has long been a thorn in the government's side, repeatedly evading an unprecedented government offensive against the cartels and spurring his henchmen on to new levels of barbarity.

"El Chapo has been able to maintain serious battles going on all over the country and still keep the business going," says Javier Valdez, an investigative journalist in Guzman's home state of Sinaloa. "He is a very intelligent guy."

Guzman was born in 1954 in a mountainous part of the northern state already famed for its opium poppy cultivation and talented traffickers. By the time he was arrested in 1993 he was a second tier figure in the Mexican cartels that were claiming an ever bigger role moving cocaine produced in the Andes to the insatiable US market.

The most recent pictures of El Chapo in the public domain today date from those years in a high security jail that ended abruptly on 19 January 2001 when he escaped. The official version says he got out hidden in a laundry van.

El Chapo then got busy creating a loose alliance of different kingpins later called the Sinaloa Cartel. It became one of the two main axes in the war to control smuggling routes, local production and domestic markets. The other is the Gulf Cartel, led by the notoriously bloodthirsty Zetas. The conflict killed around 6,000 people in 2008, including one of El Chapo's sons gunned down outside a shopping centre, and well over 1,000 so far this year.

El Chapo has been notoriously successful in corrupting the authorities, but his organisation is equally given to indulging in the torture, beheadings and extreme violence that are the hallmarks of the current conflict over who controls the business. US State Department undersecretary David Johnson estimated on Tuesday that Mexican traffickers make profits of between $13bn and $25bn a year.

"There are other traffickers who are probably as powerful as El Chapo Guzman, but he is the one that makes the most noise," says Valdez, the journalist from Sinaloa. "He is the stuff of legend too because they look and look, but they can't seem to find him."

One of the most recent confirmed sightings was in December 2007 when Chapo went out for a meal in a popular restaurant in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. Valdez says the kingpin went from table to table introducing himself and shaking hands with the other diners before disappearing into a back room to eat a steak with his inner circle. Before he left he paid everybody's bill.

Sightings are more frequent in the mountains where he has several residences and is protected by communities who revere, as well as fear, him. Alberto looks after one of his houses and proudly shows off photographs of the helicopter landing area outside as he describes his boss's penchant for those village parties.